Adams admin dodges questions about struggling legal program
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Department of Social Services attorney Raniece Medley appears before the City Council to discuss the city’s Right to Counsel program on Monday, March 27, 2023. Photo by Gerardo Romo / New York City Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
The Adams administration had difficulty answering questions about the city’s struggling Right to Counsel program during a City Council oversight hearing held on Monday.
Appearing before the council’s Committee on General Welfare and the Committee on Housing for a hearing on the Right to Counsel program, which is supposed to provide indigent defendants facing eviction with an attorney but has struggled to meet demand, representatives from the Office of Civil Justice, the Department of Social Services and the Human Resources Administration were unable to answer a number of questions lobbed at them on Monday.
“We are creating a homelessness crisis – so, to have the chief homeless prevention officer sitting up here with the legal services coordinator, to say nothing to defend tenants who are on the brink of eviction, to me, this administration is actively contributing to the homelessness crisis,” Councilmember Lincoln Restler said at the hearing.
Restler’s comments came directly after Department of Social Services lawyer Raniece Medley declined to say whether or not the Adams administration believes that Housing Court cases where an attorney has not been provided to a qualified defendant should move forward.
The councilmember later said that he believed Medley and the other representatives from the administration were sent to the hearing by City Hall as “sacrificial lambs to get beat up.”
Similarly, City Councilmember Shaun Abreu expressed concern over a lack of response from the administration about a resolution up for discussion on Monday that calls on state lawmakers to pass a bill that would force courts to pause eviction cases if a tenant has yet to be given legal representation.
“It's been two weeks that this has been noticed for today and the administration has no position on this resolution,” Abreu said with noticeable frustration. “I feel gaslit…Let me relax.”
Abreu’s resolution was one of two up for discussion during Monday’s hearing. Also on the table was a resolution calling on the state to establish an office of civil representation to provide access to legal services in eviction proceedings.
The Right to Counsel program was passed by the City Council in 2017 and phased in over the following five years, expanding citywide in 2022, just as the city’s eviction moratorium expired.
In addition to the influx of cases filed post-moratorium – both new cases and cases that were paused during the pandemic – staffing shortages in public defender firms have put a strain on the program, which has been unable to meet demand.
Several times last year, public defender firms halted intake for the program, which only accepts tenants whose income is within 200 percent of the federal poverty level.
In January 2022, when the program was expanded citywide, around 65 percent of tenants facing eviction proceedings had an attorney within the first week of proceedings, according to data collected by the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition.
Nearly every month since, that number has dropped. By December 2022, around 35 percent of tenants had representation within the first week of their case, Right to Counsel NYC Coalition data shows.
And advocates say the program works – in cases where tenants were represented by an attorney, cases ended without an eviction around 84 percent of the time.
Consistently, around 95 percent of landlords have legal representation during eviction proceedings.
“I'm afraid to say that this initiative is in tatters, in its current state,” Restler said on Monday. “I am extremely disappointed by the lack of representation that tenants are facing in Housing Court.”
“We are failing to follow the law,” he added.
Public defense attorneys speaking on Monday said that their firms are consistently too under-staffed and under-resourced to meet the demands of the program.
“It's not fair and it's not sustainable,” said Rosalind Black, the citywide director of housing at Legal Services NYC. “The number of cases funded right now with this program is significantly short of the need and woefully inadequate.”
“Continuing to underfund this program is undermining Right to Counsel and they're leaving people facing eviction without attorneys,” Black added. “We have to hire and retain enough staff so people aren't burned out and they have a reasonable caseload so that they can provide high-quality representation.”
On Monday, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who sponsored the bill as a city councilmember, put a handful of the blame on the Office of Court Administration, which has thus far resisted calls to slow the calendering of cases in Housing Court.
“OCA and the chief justice has the ability to determine the rules in the courthouses of this state and the city – they did it during COVID, in fact, they actually ultimately shut down eviction proceedings, which was necessary at the time,” Levine said. “They have the ability to do this, but they have refused to do so.”
During his State of the Judiciary speech given in late February, Acting Chief Judge Anthony Cannataro said that despite the program’s troubles, he wasn’t in favor of slowing down proceedings.
“This past year, over 104,000 residential eviction filings were filed in the New York City Housing Courts, but participating legal service providers declined to represent thousands of tenants in large part due to a shortage of attorneys and caseloads that we know often leave them feeling overworked, underpaid, and emotionally drained,” he said in February.
“The law simply does not permit our housing courts to grind to a halt,” he added. “We are committed to supporting creative strategies to augment the availability of legal representation in housing cases to enable the speedy resolution of disputes and to minimize resort to eviction. In the meantime, our Housing Courts will continue to assist tenants and landlords in a fair and timely manner.”
The Office of Court Administration did not respond to request for comment on Monday.
